Rule Forty Two: The Self-Aggrandizing Website of Gavin Edwards

Donna Summer wasn’t the diva of the dance floor for me: she was an unearthly voice coming through my AM radio when I was a sixth-grader, my elementary-school channel to the divine. A couple of decades later, she got on the phone with me to talk about the history of disco, and was kind enough to discuss the recording of “Love to Love You Baby” and the inspiration behind “Bad Girls.” The world’s a poorer place without her. Toot-toot, beep-beep.

posted 17 May 2012 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

This is one of those articles that was in the works so long, I missed the moment when it actually saw print: my profile of aspiring golfer Dan McLaughlin. But although the April issue of Men’s Journal has left newsstands, I encourage you to click over to their website, because McLaughlin is a fascinating guy: a former photographer of dental equipment who at age 30, despite never having played golf in his life, decided to devote 10,000 hours of his life to practicing the sport in an effort to join the PGA Tour. The odds are good that while you’re reading this, he is practicing somewhere.

posted 14 May 2012 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

The Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” isn’t just the rare song with two parentheses in the title, or the MTV debut of Tabitha Soren. Even after a three-decade Beastie career, it remains the cornerstone of their work. So five perspectives on a #7 single:

1. Public Enemy, “Party for Your Right to Fight”–a brilliant inversion, turning “Party” into a noun, specifically, the Black Panther Party.

2. Coldplay’s live cover: a mournful joke (on both the Beasties and Coldplay), but genuinely moving.

3. Fight for Your Right (Revisited): a half-hour fantasia (directed by Yauch), released last year to promote Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, starring Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, and Danny McBride as the Beasties circa 1986, and John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell, and Danny McBride as the Beasties of the future. Spoiler alert: They have a dance-off.

4. Baseball infographic artist Craig Robinson did a wonderful chart breaking down the vocals in the song.

5. Adam Yauch, in the liner notes to the 1999 compilation The Sounds of Science, remembers the track as “a joke that went too far.” The end of his thoughtful essay on the song as the harbinger of the early wave of Beastie fame:

But it was too late to turn in any other direction; we were caught up in the frenzy. The shows were sold out. It seemed like there was nothing to do but keep coming out on stage every night drinking beer and playing the role. The strangest part about it was that after a short time I think we actually became just what it was that we’d set out to make fun of. By drinking so much beer and acting like sexist macho jerks we actually became just that.

So I guess that the story could have a couple of possible morals. One might be, “Be careful of what you make fun of or you might become it.” But the other one, the one that I like is, “All of the sexist macho jerks in the world are just pretending cause they’re caught in a rut, and maybe, at some point in the future, when the planets line up in a certain way, they’ll all just snap out of it.”

posted 9 May 2012 in Links, Tasty Bits. 1 comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about Adam Yauch, and how, aside from everything else, his life was a testament to how much a person can change during their time here on Earth.

I never met the man (although I did interview his bandmates last year). I’ve been remembering the times I saw the Beastie Boys play live. I missed the Licensed to Ill tour–no inflatable penis for me, apparently–but I did see one of the few shows they did to support Paul’s Boutique, an excellent secret gig at the short-lived New York club called The Building. (My future wife was also in attendance, although we hadn’t yet met.)

The last time I saw the Beastie Boys in concert was back in 1994–I had no idea it had been that long ago. I joined the Lollapalooza tour for seven shows, on assignment for Details. I was mostly writing about the technology tent, but I took a break every day so I could see a different act in the lineup (Nick Cave, the Breeders, A Tribe Called Quest, L7, George Clinton, the Flaming Lips–it was a very strong bill). The tent folded up in the late afternoon, leaving me at liberty to see the last two bands if I wanted. I never made it through more than a couple of songs by the headlining Smashing Pumpkins, but I saw every single set by the Beasties.

Their hour in Kansas City had one of my favorite moments ever at a concert (or in life), which wouldn’t have happened if the crowd had not been eating lots of personal pan pizzas, served by a vendor in small cardboard boxes. When the Beastie Boys started playing “Sabotage,” everybody went nuts–not only did the crowd pogo, but they threw the pizza boxes up in the air, and kept hurling them up for the duration of the song, making the field look like an immense popcorn machine. It was three of the most joyful minutes I’ve ever been a part of, and Adam Yauch was playing bass at the center of the maelstrom.

posted 8 May 2012 in Tasty Bits. 3 comments

My apologies for the unplanned hiatus: I’m in book crunch mode, which has been soaking up every free minute, and many that aren’t free. But I wanted to let you know about an interview I did for Playboy with Grant Morrison, who has been one of my favorite comic-book writers for many years now. I took a ferry across the River Clyde to visit him and his wife Kristan at their home outside of Glasgow–thanks to both for their hospitality–and we spent hours breaking down many of the characters he’s invented and reinvented. Click here to read it (that’ll take you to the Playboy website, and while the article is SFW, the marginal ads may feature scantily clad women). The paper edition, on newsstands now, gives you an even better look at that excellent Frank Quitely illustration. (For the record, Morrison is not particularly wrinkled in real life.) If this just whets your appetite, go pick up Morrison’s autobiographical history of comics, Supergods.

Bonus track! Morrison’s perspective on Iron Man:
The most popular comics characters right now are Iron Man and Batman, who are both millionaire playboys. That’s the dream man of our society–the guy who’s bigger than the military-industrial complex. He doesn’t have to answer to anyone because he’s got so much money, there’s nothing you can do to stop him. People don’t care about the socialist hero; these days, they want to be the socialite hero.

posted 30 April 2012 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

A short Q&A with the mighty Joe Perry.

posted 30 March 2012 in Outside. no comments yet

Is this: my short report on the Aerosmith press conference today. While I was waiting to interview the band afterwards (followup article soon), I wrote a rough draft on paper, typed it up, emailed it in, and hello world.

posted 28 March 2012 in Outside. no comments yet

On the 1868 Soldiers’ Memorial in the center of the town square of Santa Fe:

Apparently the word that’s been chiseled out is “savage.”

posted 23 March 2012 in Photos. no comments yet

Where is “Bullet the Blue Sky” set? I always assumed the United States–mostly because of the way Bono keeps saying “Outside is America.” But just recently I tracked on the lyric in Bono’s rap:

You take the staircase to the first floor

And thought it was an amusing Irish mistake–here in the U.S.A., pal, we walk through the front door right into the first floor, the way the founding fathers intended! But if I’m being fair to Bono (which I suppose I should be, since it’s a leap year), the song is about the heavy weight of America in an impoverished country; e.g., “across the mud huts where the children sleep.” (Apparently, it was inspired by a trip Bono took to El Salvador.) America is outside, but it’s not inside–so the song may describe a tesseract.

posted 22 March 2012 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

That was the dullest Academy Awards ever, right? But there were some highlights for me, not least that Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won the Film Editing Oscar for their work on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo–work that they were kind enough to dissect for me (and the readers of The New York Times). Also, although Melissa McCarthy didn’t win for Best Supporting Actress, she looked genuinely joyful to see her fellow Groundlings heading up to the stage to receive the Adapted Screenplay award for The Descendants (just before Jim Rash stole the show with his impromptu mimickry of Angelina Jolie’s posture). Rock on!

posted 27 February 2012 in Articles, Links. no comments yet